My experience with Hyper-V Failover Clusters has showed me that it is best to install all updates and hotfixes on member hosts to try avoid any major issues. This page gives a brief intro to one of the cases that made me take this stance and will allow you to download and use two scripts which will allow you to check if a hyper-v host, or nodes in a cluster, has/have the recommended hotfixes installed.

Today I went to install some updates on a Windows Server 2012 R2 server via Windows Update. When checking for updates the operation failed with error 800B0001 as seen in the screenshot below I googled to see how I would resolve the issue and came across this Microsoft KB947821 article. Since I have Server 2012 R2…

We had a situation were a customer has a single VMware ESXi 5.5 host connected to an APC UPS and he required that the VMs and host shut down cleanly when a power failure occurred and the server was running on the UPS batteries. When the UPS has a network module, like the APC AP9630,…

At my workplace we use the Devolutions Remote Desktop Manager (RDM) application. The application allows you to build a database with the IT resources you manage. If you haven’t tried it already I suggest you give the Free Edition or Enterprise Trial a go. In our case we assist many customers remotely and this application…

Recently we had a client that deleted an exchange mailbox by mistake. He quickly recreated it for the user to be able to receive and send e-mails but in the meantime the user had lost all her mailbox information. Although there are many useful tools to backup and restore exchange mailboxes, in this case the…

A customer has two DELL Powervault MD3620f SAN arrays which included the Remote Replication feature. The Virtual Disks (VDs) hosting the VMware Datastores are replicated across the two SANs, in different buildings, by using hardware Synchronous replication. Some of the Primary VDs are stored on the SAN in site A and replicated to the SAN…

If you have multiple internet connections or site to site tunnels, like VPN or IPIP, with multiple links, you may want to load balance between the links. With Mikrotik this is achieved very easily. Lets take for example the below scenario: ISP Link 1 Gateway IP : 1.1.1.1 ISP Link 2 Gateway IP : 2.2.2.1…

I have a customer that is replicating his Virtual Machines from a Hyper-V standalone host in the primary site to another host in his DR site. The hosts are installed with Windows Server 2012 R2. Veeam Backup and Replication 7, patch 4, is used to replcate the virtual machines. All the replication jobs were working…

I have been meaning to keep a record of the VSS writers and associated services to restart. I wrote this post mainly for personal reference.

In RouterOS 6.30, a new property has been added to some of the tunnels like IPIP and gre which configures an IPsec transport policy for the interfaces. I will go through the process of configuring an IPIP tunnel by using this property